Free Bastards: A Memoir by Mary Anna King Page B

away from so many years ago. He wore tan trousers and a periwinkle button-front shirt that made the blue in his blue-gray eyes stand out.
    Granddad was immediately different from the daddies I had seen before. Standing at five feet eleven inches, he was the tallest man I’d seen in person. When he enlisted in the Air Force at the age of seventeen—before age compressed his bones—he was probably a full six feet. He was broad-shouldered and bifocaled, with a belly that spilled slightly over his belt. The sheer amount of space he took up demanded my attention. His silver hair was parted deep on the right side and tastefully combed back. It was the same hairstyle he’d worn since he was a child in the 1940s in Philadelphia. In addition to his wedding band and a large silver watch, Granddad wore an enormous garnet ring on his right hand; the stone was bigger than his knuckles. When our group reached him, he kissed Mimi on the forehead, then methodi cally hiked up the legs of his trousers before squatting down and wrapping Rebecca in a bear hug. He wrapped Jacob and me in a second, shared hug, then turned to the business of tracking down our luggage.
    Granddad’s eyes darted to television screens that told where each flight’s bags could be found. “It says carousel number two, but we’ll see . . .” he said, already bracing himself for things to deviate from his plan. The walk to baggage claim was punctuated with Granddad’s sporadic exhalations as he struggled under the weight of the many things he could say right now, but wouldn’t.
    We collected our few small bags—from carousel four, not two. Granddad shook his head because he hated to be right about these things. Then we climbed into his shiny Chrysler. I worried that I was sullying its light gray upholstery by simply breathing on it. I was careful not to brush my shoes on the seat and leave a stain.
    As we drove toward Mimi and Granddad’s house, Rebecca chirped out the names of the streets we took.
    “Interstate 40!”
    “Twenty-ninth Street!”
    “Grand Boulevard!”
    Granddad rumbled from the driver’s seat, “What street do we take to get home?” and my sister said, “McKinley Avenue!”
    I could only see the upper half of this new world as it crawled slowly past my window. The few trees I could make out were short and fat and wind-burned. Without tall buildings or trees to frame it, the sky filled my view like an ocean.
    Jacob dug his elbow deep into my side when the Chrysler pulled into the brick driveway of the house on Forty-fourth Street. I sucked in my breath. The house was built into a hill on an acre of land in the middle of the city. In a state that had so far looked like a flat moonscape, Mimi and Granddad had found a spot that was covered with trees and topography.
    Two collies rushed to the chain-link fence as the car came to a stop. When they saw Rebecca step out of the car, the dogs jumped on each other’s backs and fought to be the first to lick her hands through the fence.
    The house was two and half stories, gray with white trim. Granddad pushed a giant wooden front door open and the air-conditioned air turned the sweat on my skin into goose bumps. From the main entryway, the first floor of the house split into three rooms: the living room to the right, Granddad’s den to the left, the dining room straight ahead. Between Granddad’s den and the dining room a staircase led to the second floor, which contained only the attic and one bedroom. Past the dining room were two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the kitchen. Beneath the preserving effects of the central air-conditioning was the hint of lemon polish, window cleaner, and the toasty aroma of wall-to-wall carpet that had been recently vacuumed.
    Mimi glided through the rooms with the fluency of a native, delicately removing her driving gloves finger by finger and laying them on the edge of the dining room table. She wore driving gloves whenever she left the house, regardless of